The Time of Kali: Violence between Religious

Transcript

The Time of Kali: Violence between Religious Groups in India
Sudhir Kakar
Abstract
The author focuses on the theme of violence between Hindus and Muslims in India in
great depth and detail. He conducts an analysis of the phenomena by integrating
various points of view: religious, historical, social, economic and psychological. He
closely examines the psychological reasons that are the base of the conflicting
relationships between the two different religious groups and does so from a
psychoanalytical angle. He lays out the projective and fantasmatic processes that
define the image of the other as being an enemy when the formation of an identity
that is based on radical communityism is formed in both groups. This then prevails
over any social plan.
Key words: religious violence, identity, communalism, colonialism, basic trust,
psychology of the masses.
On the afternoon of 11th December, 1990, Sardar, a Muslim auto-rickshaw driver,
was stabbed outside a coal depot in the old part of the city of Hyderabad in the south
of India. The assailants were two Hindu youths. Muslims retaliated by stabbing four
Hindus in different parts of the old, walled city. The violence that followed was to
last for ten weeks, claim more than three hundred lives and leave thousands wounded.
When I began the study of this “riot”—as violent altercations between Hindus and
Muslims are usually called—in the following year, interviewing not only the
survivors but also agents of this violence, I was struck by the consensus within and
between the communities on the events preceding the riot. The murder of Sardar was
the trigger for the violence, while the gun was the rising tension between Hindus and
Muslims in the country since the beginning of October when L.K. Advani, the
present Home Minister of India and then the President of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata
Party) began a rath yatra from the temple of Somnath on the west coast to Ayodhya
in the Hindi heartland of the north. The stated purpose of the yatra, which was to take
Advani through a large part of the country in thirty days and over ten thousand
kilometers, was to mobilize support for the construction of the Rama temple at the
legendary birth site of the god where stood an unused mosque constructed in the
sixteenth century in honor of the founder of the Mughal dynasty. The yatra aroused
intense fervor among the Hindus. Crowds thronged the roads all over the country,
showering flower petals on the cavalcade as it passed through their villages and
towns. In a more somber aftermath, there was violence between Hindus and Muslims
in many places in wake of the rath yatra.
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Advani’s cavalcade came to a halt when he was arrested on 23 October in Bihar
before he could start on the last lap of his journey to Ayodhya where the BJP had
promised to start the construction of the temple on 9 November. On that day, scores
were killed when the police opened fire on volunteers intent on the demolition of the
Babri mosque as a prelude to building the temple. Soon, Hindu-Muslim riots erupted
in many parts of the country.
The Context of Religious Violence
The consensus on the immediate events leading to the 1990 violence in Hyderabad
disappears when we come to the more distal causes. The wider context of the HinduMuslim violence shows large variations within and across social science disciplines.
It is as if different parts of the background in a large canvas that foregrounds dead
bodies lying in the alleys and burnt houses in Hyderabad in December 1990 has been
painted in a variety of distinct styles by painters belonging to different schools, their
palettes sometimes complementary and at others clashing.
In the school which accords primacy to the economic factor, the conflict between the
two communities that leads to violent clashes is believed to have less to do with
religion than with ‘communalism’. Communalism is a specifically Indian concept
which signifies a strong identification with a community of believers which has not
only has religious affiliation but also social, political and especially economic
interests in common which conflict with the corresponding interests of another
community of believers—the enemy-- sharing the same geographic space. In the
economic vision, the ‘real’ cause of violence generally embraces some version of a
class struggle between the poor and the rich. This, it is claimed, is as true of the antiSemitic pogroms in Spain in the fourteenth century (Wolff, 1971), of sixteenthcentury Catholic-Protestant violence in France (Estebe, 1968; Davis, 1987), of antiCatholic riots in nineteenth-century London (Rude, 1964), as of contemporary HinduMuslim riots in India (Engineer, 1984; Arslam, Rajan, 1994). In the more
contemporary formulation of rational-choice theory, the conflict between groups is a
consequence of competition for resources, with individuals believing that they can
benefit if their group gains at the expense of the other group (Hardin, 1995).
Another school emphasizes the wider political context of such conflicts, especially
the ending of the colonial rule (Horowitz, 1985). If Hindu-Muslim relations were
better in the past, with much less overt violence, it was also the kind of polity in
which two the two peoples lived. This polity was that of the empire, the Mughal
empire followed by the British one. An empire, the political scientist Michael Walzer
(1982) observes, is characterized by a mixture of repression for any strivings for
independence, tolerance for different cultures, religions and ways of life and
insistence that things remain peaceful. It is only with the end of the empire that the
political questions—‘Who among us shall have power here, in these villages, these
towns?’, ‘Which group will dominate, what will be the new ranking order?’—that
leads to a heightened awareness of religious-cultural differences, and establishing the
potential for violent conflict. The rise of fundamentalist groups and the politicization
of religious differences in many parts of the world at the end of colonialism has been
amply documented (Marty, Appleby, 1991, 1993). In one branch of the political
school, emphasizing more local than international relations, riots between Hindus and
Muslims occur in towns and cities where formal professional and trade associations
which include members of both communities are weak or non-existent (Varshney,
Wilkinson, 1996).
Enter, the historians. If one looks at the historical context, then Hindus and Muslims
are relatively recent categories in Indian history, one school of history avers (Thapar,
Mukhia, Chandra, 1969). In pre-colonial and early colonial times, there was a
commingling and flowering of a composite cultural tradition and the development of
a syncretic popular religion. The large-scale violence between the two communities,
which began to spread in the late nineteenth century was chiefly because of
colonialism, namely the British policy of deliberately strengthening Muslim
communal identity because of the threat of Indian nationalism (Pandey, 1990).
The other school, disparagingly called ‘Hindu nationalist’ by the former, ‘secular’ set
of historians, sees Hindu-Muslim relations framed by the fundamental divide of a
thousand-year old ‘civilizational’ conflict in which the Muslims, militarily victorious
and politically ascendant for centuries, tried to impose Islam on their Hindu subjects
through all means, from coercion to bribery and cajolery, and yet had only limited
success (e.g. Majumdar, 1970). The vast majority of Hindus kept their civilizational
core intact while they resentfully tolerated the Muslim onslaught. The rage of the
denigrated Hindu, stored up over long periods of time, had to explode once historical
circumstances sanctioned such eruptions.
In painting the contextual background of the Hyderabad violence, the socialpsychological school would stress the identity threat that is being posed by the forces
of modernization and globalization to peoples in many parts of the world. There are
feelings of loss and helplessness accompanying dislocations and migrations from
rural areas to the shanty towns of urban megalopolises, the disappearance of craft
skills that underlay traditional work identities, and the humiliation caused by the
homogenizing and hegemonizing impact of the modern world, which pronounces
ancestral cultural ideals and values outmoded and irrelevant. These changes heighten
the group aspects of identity as the affected (and afflicted) look to cultural-religious
groups to combat their feelings of helplessness and loss and to serve as vehicles for
the redress of injuries to self-esteem (e.g. Kakar, 1996).
The vision of the psychoanalytic school is derived from its conception of the origins
of human development. Because of early difficulties in integrating contradictory
representations of the self and the parents-the 'good’ loving child and the ‘bad’ raging
one; the benevolent, care-taking parent and the hateful, frustrating one—the child
must disown the anxiety provoking bad representations through projection. First
projected to inanimate objects and animals and later to people and other groups—the
latter often available to a child as a pre-selection by the group—the disavowed bad
representations need such ‘reservoirs as Vamik Volkan (1990) calls them. Hindus and
Muslims need each other as enemies. They are each other’s necessary reservoirs,
repositories for hateful feelings for which no clear-cut addressee is available.
Not all the schools are based on complex and sophisticated visions of causes that lead
to violence between religious groups. We also have the rough and ready brush strokes
of the demographic perspective which says that urban areas and within them only
those with a Muslim minority population ranging between 20 and 40 percent of the
total population, have always been riot prone (Engineer, 1984; Saxena, 1984;
Krishna, 1985); Hyderabad, of course, fulfills both conditions. Presumably, with a
population share of under 20 percent, a minority is much too scared to retaliate to
what it may perceive as a provocation and the violence, if it occurs at all, will have
the nature of a pogrom rather than a riot.
As a psychoanalyst, I can then only note that violence between Hindus and Muslims
is a complex demographic, political, economic, historical, social and psychological
phenomenon before I turn to the corner of the canvas my school can call distinctly, if
not uniquely, its own—the delineation of the subjective experience of men, women
and children—both Hindu and Muslim—in one particular location, the old, walled
part of the city of Hyderabad and at one particular time when the tension between the
two communities progressed from the activation of a dormant conflict to the
murderous violence of a full-fledged riot. Like a clinical case study, this
reconstruction of internal states of the subjects suffers from the shortcoming that the
accounts are retrospective, collected in interviews eight months after the events.
There is thus an inevitable repression of some memories and the embellishment of
certain others, both designed to accomplish particular pragmatic actions such as a
demonstration of the moral superiority of one’s own group but also its status as a
victim.
Hindu—Muslim Violence in Hyderabad
The conflict between Hindus and Muslims in Hyderabad was dormant in the sense
that the last riot had taken place in 1984. Before that, since 1978, there was at least a
riot a year, sometimes more, the number of lives lost in six years estimated at over
four hundred. Each of the schools is well represented in the explanation of the
conflict. As a Muslim ruled state by a Nizam under the sufferance of first the Mughal
and then the British empires, Hyderabad was integrated into an independent India in
1951 when the political question of new patterns of dominance was reopened.
Demographically, the minority population in the old city—in this case Hindu—
increased from 21 to 40 percent in the 1970’s till the endemic violence reversed the
trend, the Hindu population being around 30 percent in 1990. Economically, with the
dismantling of the Nizam’s administrative machinery, the disappearance of the feudal
economic base on which most of the old city had subsisted and the migration of many
of the wealthier Muslims to Pakistan after Hyderabad became a part of India, the
economic competition between the two communities for the few economic
opportunities, such as the control of the vegetable trade, became fierce.
Historically(in the ‘nationalist’ version), although the Hindus were always a part of
what was essentially a Muslim city, their native Telegu culture was clearly a
subordinate, ‘low’ culture in the dominant Perso-Islamic scheme of things. The dark
skinned Hindu peasantry was assigned a humble place in the cultural pecking order
where fair-skinned Persian migrants were right at the top, followed by Turks, other
central Asian immigrants and the native-born Indian Muslims. Although talented high
caste Hindus like the Brahmins and the Kayasthas could rise to high positions in the
court and the coexistence between Hindus and Muslims was easier in an earlier era (a
nod to the ‘secular’ school), the current popular Hindu version—much more
uncontested than the variable, academic versions of the past that are always subject to
different interpretations (Lowenthal,1989)- of the historical conflict goes like this:
“The clashes between Hindus and Muslims started long ago in the period of the
Nizam and his razakars (a marauding, unofficial army) who were very cruel to the
Hindus. They used to harass our girls, rape them. This happened not only in villages
but even in Hyderabad. We feared the Muslims. The rule was theirs, the king was
theirs, the police was theirs, so it was hard for the Hindus to resist. We were also poor
and no one supports the poor. Some marwadis may have been well-off but the
majority of Hindus was poor. The Muslims were close to the king. They were
moneylenders, charging high rates of interest. Thus they were rich and the Hindus
poor and though we lived together Muslims dominated the Hindus.”(Kakar, 1996)
It is instructive to note that in popular accounts of the conflict, the economic, secular
and nationalist historical explanations are not exclusive but blended into a single
narrative. Unlike the historians, the people involved in the conflict operate with two
histories of Hindu-Muslim relations. In times of heightened conflict between the two
communities, the Hindu nationalist history that supports the version of age-old
animosity between the two assumes preeminence and organizes cultural memory in
one particular direction. In times of relative peace, the focus shifts back to the secular
history emphasizing commonalities and shared pieces of the past. Many of the
cultural memories that were appropriate during the conflict will retreat, fade, or take
on new meaning, while others that incorporate the peaceful coexistence of Hindus
and Muslims will resurface.
The social-psychological context of the conflict was especially evident in case of
Muslims who were more prone to view themselves as helpless victims of changed
historical circumstances and the demands of the modern world. They conveyed an
impression of following a purposeless course, buffeted by the impact of others in a
kind of social Brownian motion. Some Muslim women even took a melancholy
satisfaction from this turn of the historical wheel which had reversed the position of
subjects and rulers and of the accustomed directions of inequality and injustice. The
loss of a collective self-idealization was especially evident in case of the elite among
the Muslims which explicitly mourned the loss of Muslim power and glory in the
abrupt ending of the Nizam’s rule. For this elite, with a fractured self-esteem in the
wake of historical change that saw an end to their political role and a virtual
disappearance of their language, as also in case of poor Muslims with an inchoate
sense of oppression and the looming shadow of a menacing, hopeless future, there
were enough fundamentalist preachers offering a cure. The bad condition of the
Muslims is not due to historical changes but because of a glaring internal fault: the
weakening or loss of religious faith. “No wonder”, says one Mullah, “that Islam is
bending under the assault of kufr(unbelief); Arabs are bowing before Jews and
Christians, you before the Hindus. What is this preoccupation with worldly wealth
and success? Allah says, I did not bring you into the world to make two shops out of
one, four out of two, two factories out of one, four out of two. Does the Qur’an want
you to do that? Does the Prophet? No! They want you to dedicate yourself to the
faith, give your life for the glory of Islam.” (Kakar,1996.
Communal Identities
Besides organizing memories of Hindu-Muslim relations according to the conflict
version of history, the activation of the dormant conflict also had the consequence of
bringing an individual’s communal identity—‘communal’ in the Indian sense, with
antagonism towards a rival religious group as its defining feature-- to the fore.
Whereas an individual’s religious group identity, manifesting itself in congregational
activities such as prayer or ritual, creates feelings of attunement and resonance with
other believers, communal identity is charged with an ambience of aggression and
persecution. Religious identity, constituted through an awareness of belonging to a
community of believers is replaced by the communal identity’s assertion of this
affiliation; the “We-ness” of the religious group identity gives way to the “We are”
of the communal identity. The self-assertion of “We are”, with its potential for
confrontation with the “We are” of the other religious group, is inherently a carrier of
aggression, together with the consequent fears of retaliation and persecution and is
thus always attended by a sense of risk and potential for violence.
The distinction between religious and communal group identities can also be seen in
a noteworthy difference between the Hindus and Muslims. A Hindu’s selfidentification occurs only when he talks of the Muslim; otherwise the conversation is
in terms of castes. The Muslim’s awareness of his religious group identity, as a
member of a community of believers, does not need the presence of a Hindu (Kakar,
1996), a finding which is also true of other parts of India (Ghosh, Kumar, Tripathi,
1992). On the other hand, there is no difference between Hindus and Muslims in the
pervasiveness and strength of their communal identities.
As Hindus and Muslims began to see each other as stereotypes,
perceiving each other in terms of shared category characteristics rather than their
personal, idiosyncratic natures, an inevitable homogenization and depersonalization
followed. Conversations couched in terms of group categories, “Look at what the
Hindus are doing!”, “The Muslims have crossed all limits!”, increased markedly. The
rhetoric of violence became frequent though it still remained a substitute for action.
The conscious experiencing and expression of identity through the religious group
rather than through other group identities such as those of family, caste or profession,
varies with individuals. At the one extreme there are always some Hindus and
Muslims, whose personal identity is not overwhelmed by their communal identity
even in the worst phases of a violent conflict. These are persons who wear their group
identity lightly and are capable of acts of compassion and self-sacrifice, such as
saving members of the ‘enemy’ group from the fury of a rampaging mob even at
considerable danger to their own physical safety. On the other extreme there are
others—the fanatics—whose behavior, even in times of peace is dictated by their
communal identity, an armor that is rarely taken off.
In both communities, communal identities also tended to be less salient for women
than men, a difference that seems to be rooted in their developmental histories. There
was a significant gender difference between boys and girls from the ages of ten and
fifteen when they were given the task of constructing an ‘exciting’ scene using toys
and dolls easily identifiable as Hindu or Muslim (Kakar, 1996, 146-151). Scenes of
violence between the two communities were relatively absent in the girls’
constructions whereas they dominated those of the boys. Even when they identified
the dolls as Hindu or Muslim, girls tended to construct peaceful scenes from family
life, with the excitement—such as a policeman chasing a robber—banished to the
periphery.
The Role of Religious-Political Demagogues
The activation of a perennial Hindu-Muslim conflict version of history and a
movement of communal identities to the forefront of consciousness still need
powerful additional impulses before the outbreak of violence becomes possible. The
zone of indifference with regards to one’s faith and religious community in which
everyday life is lived, unfettered and unworried by excessive and obsessive scrutiny,
may be breached by momentous external events such as the demolition of the Babri
mosque but the breach needs considerable widening before violence comes pouring
out. It is here that religious demagogues, owing allegiance to fundamentalist political
formations, enter the scene, stoking persecution anxiety with images of a besieged
and endangered community on the verge of extinction at the hands of the other,
enemy group.
“In Kashmir, the Hindu was a minority and was hounded out of the valley,” the
Hindu demagogue thunders. “Slogans of ‘Long live Pakistan’ were carved with red
hot iron rods on the thighs of our Hindu daughters. Try to feel the unhappiness and
pain of the Hindu who became a refugee in his own country. The Hindu was
dishonored in Kashmir because he was in a minority. But there is a conspiracy to
make him a minority in the whole country. The state tells us Hindus to have only two
or three children. After a while, they will say do not have even one. But what about
those who have six wives, have thirty or thirty-five children and breed like
mosquitoes and flies?…
I submit to you that when the Hindu of Kashmir became a minority he came to
Jammu. From Jammu he came to Delhi. But if you Hindus are on the run all over
India, where will you go? Drown in the Indian ocean or jump from the peak of the
Himalayas?”(Kakar, 1996,208).
“Awake O Indian Muslims before you disappear completely. Even your story will not
find mention in other stories,” the Muslim demagogue retorts (Kakar, 1996).
Here, the demagogue can count on memories of previous Hindu-Muslim riots all over
the country which have almost always had their origin in the fear of one community
being exterminated or seriously damaged by the other. The demolition of the Babri
mosque played into a long standing fear of Indian Muslims of being swamped by a
preponderant and numerous Hindu host, a chain of associations leading from the
razing of an unused mosque to the disappearance of Islam in India. The 1969 riot in
Ahmedabad was preceded by a period of tension when the RSS (Rashtriya
Swyamsevak Sangh) began a campaign demanding the “Indianization” of Muslims
and thus initiating a similar chain of mental associations. For the Hindus, the Muslim
threat is to very survival of their homeland which is imperiled either through the
Muslim’s demonstrative identification with pan-Islamic causes or in the demand for a
separate cultural identity, expressed through the insistence on maintaining Islamic
personal law or in demanding a greater role for Urdu. Here the threat to the Hindus
travels through an associative chain where such Muslim actions are viewed as
precursors to violent Muslim separatism (as in Kashmir), the creation of another
Pakistan and, ultimately, the dreaded revival of medieval Muslim rule.
As in individuals, where persecution anxiety often manifests itself in threats to the
integrity of the body, especially during psychotic episodes, the speech of the
demagogues is rich in metaphors of the “community-body” under concrete, physical
assault. The imagery of the Hindu or Muslim body amputated, raped, slashed,
harnesses the power of unconscious fantasy to amplify the threat of persecution,
anchoring the dubious logos of a particular political argument deeply in imagination
through the power of mythos.
The Appearance of Kali
One knows that the time of Kali is at hand from the content of rumors that now begin
to circulate in the two communities. The rumors, with slight variations, are curiously
unchanging from one riot to the other. As a Hindu, I remember having heard the same
rumors as a child in the north Indian city of Rohtak during the riots that followed the
partition of the sub-continent into the states of India and Pakistan in 1947, the
Ahmedabad riot of 1969, and then in my interviews on the Hyderabad riot in 1990.
Large stocks of weapons, acid and other materials needed for manufacturing bombs
stored in the underground cellar of mosques, armed Pakistani agents seen parachuting
into the city at night are two such perennial rumors. But the more insidious ones,
heightening persecution anxiety and further helping to release our paranoid potential
have to do with dangers to the body that come from substances normally considered
benevolent: Muslims (or Hindus) having bribed milk vendors to poison the milk,
Muslims (or Hindus) breaking into grocery shops and mixing powdered glass with
the salt. It may well be that from an evolutionary perspective, rumors constitute a
sharing of information about danger which was adaptive for a group’s survival
(Zillmann, 1998), but they are also vital in the establishment of communal identity in
individuals. It is not only the feelings of dread and danger but also of exhilaration at
the transcendence of individual boundaries, the feelings of closeness and belonging to
an entity beyond one’s self, that cements this identity. Both a cause and consequence
of the foregrounding of such an identity, rumors are one of the midwives for the birth
of Kali when individuals begin to feel helpless and frightened (but also manically
exhilarated), loosened from their traditional cognitive moorings and thus prepared to
give up previously held social, economic or political explanations for communal
conflict. The strong anxiety accompanying the birth of Kali can take many people
away from ‘knowing’ back to the realm of ‘unknowing’—from a ‘knowledge’ of the
cause of their distress to a state where they do not know what it is that makes them
anxious though they do know they are in distress. One antidote to paralyzing anxiety
is anger, preferably in a violent assertion that is psychically mobilizing (Likierman,
1987), a violence almost invariably viewed by its perpetrators as preempting the
enemy’s imminent attack.
Here, “the time of Kali’ is not merely a literary conceit but a descriptive metaphor for
the internal states of those caught up in the passion of their communal identities.
From infancy, most of us carry within us a sense of “basic trust”(Erikson) that lets us
experience ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ as an interrelated goodness. This basic trust is
conveyed wordlessly through the mother as she mediates the infant’s experience of
the world, her positive reactions, in turn, expanding her baby’s realm of trust in the
outside world and its ability to cope with what is felt as alien and frightening inside.
This is the ‘good’ mother, the effulgent face of the great mother-goddess, of the fair
Durga, inclined graciously towards the infant with a faint smile on her lips. But when
the mother is unempathic, anxious or rejecting, the terrible, dark visage of Kali
appears, a goddess we must revere so that she refrains from destroying us. Kali
deepens the infant’s mistrust in the world, raises the specter of inner disintegration as
all that is alien to the ego threatens to cut loose. As communal identity, with its
propensity for violence and persecution anxiety, takes hold, the individual’s
“background of safety” (Gampel, 1997) is breached, the secure maternal presence
recedes, and all that is alien, inside and outside, comes together through projection. In
such situations, projection is not only an attempt at ridding the mind of destructive
elements but also giving the world a familiar, even if frightening, form (Cohen,
1998). The projection is not an idiosyncratic, individual process but directed by the
group, especially the demagogues who take the lead in creation of a menacingly
familiar, old enemy. The demagogue, whether Hindu or Muslim, is loath to
acknowledge any similarity and focuses only on the differences which, he seeks to
persuade those still unconvinced, are of stubborn emotional importance.
“It was the believers in the Qur’an who taught you(the Hindus) graces of life, taught
you how to eat and drink. All you had before us were tomatoes and potatoes. What
did you have? We brought jasmine, we brought frangipani. We gave the Taj Mahal,
we gave the red Fort. India was made India by us. We lived here for eight hundred
years and we made India shine… you have dimmed its light and ruined the country.
A beggar will not be grateful if made an emperor. Lay out a feast for him and he will
not like it. Throw him a piece of bread in the dust and he will get his appetite back.
Do not force us to speak out. Do not force us to come in front of you as an enemy.
God, look at their ignorance to believe we have no words
When out of pity we gave them the power of speech.” (Kakar, 1996)
The Hindu demagogue retorts:
“How can unity ever come about? The Hindu faces this way, the Muslim the other.
The Hindu writes from left to right, the Muslim from right to left. The Hindu prays to
the rising sun, the Muslim faces the setting sun when praying. If the Hindu eats with
the right hand, the Muslim with the left. If the Hindu calls India ‘Mother’, she
becomes a witch for the Muslim The Hindu worships the cow, the Muslim attains
paradise by eating beef. The Hindu keeps a moustache, the Muslim always shaves the
upper lip. Whatever the Hindu does, it is the Muslim’s religion to do its opposite. I
say, ‘If you want to do everything contrary to the Hindu, then the Hindu eats with his
mouth; you should do the opposite in this matter too!”(Kakar, 1996)
Moralities of Violence.
The large scale replacement of personal identities by a communal identity in the time
of Kali does not mean that people are now in some regressed, primitive state where
the violent side of human nature is bound to be unleashed when they collect together
in a procession or a congregation in demonstration of this identity. This essentially
Freudian postulate needs to be seen in the context of a particular period in history—
Europe between the two World Wars—when extremist ideologues of the Left and
Right were creating mass movements imbued with messianic fervor. Building on the
classic notions of crowds described by Gustave Le Bon (whose own ideas, in turn,
were framed by the dread French upper classes felt in relation to revolutionary
masses), Freud’s reflections on mass psychology were not free of the ideological
concerns of his time, namely the liberal fear of the loss of individual autonomy in a
collectivity and the socialist concern with how to make a desired collectivity tolerable
and tolerant.
The replacement of personal by communal identity only means its refocusing, of the
individual now acting according to the norms of the communal Hindu or Muslim
group. For instance, in the time of Kali, there is a very different code of morality—
not its absence—that governs the actions of both Hindus and Muslims. In both
groups, arson, looting and killing men of the other community are no longer the
serious transgressions they would be in times of peace. Yet, among both Hindus and
Muslims, there is a consensual condemnation of rape and killing of women of the
other community. Even in the time of Kali, the two communities in Hyderabad shared
in common the commandments ‘Thou shall not kill… a woman’ and ‘Thou shalt not
rape’, although the intensity of outrage associated with the transgression of these
commandments varies with and within the communities (Kakar, 1996). Both
communities view a riot as a battle exclusively between men in defense of the honor
of their “nations”. Although regrettable accidents may occur, the women are
noncombatants. Weak and vulnerable, they are entitled to protection, even by men of
the enemy host.
In Hyderabad, then, the tradition of violence between the religious communities, the
almost annual blood-letting, has developed certain norms which strongly disapproves
of rape as a vehicle of contempt, rage or hatred that one community may feel for the
other. Moreover, unlike some other ethnic/religious conflicts, such as the one in
Bosnia, Hindus and Muslims still have to live together after a riot, carry out a
minimal social and considerable economic interaction. Rape makes such interactions
impossible and turns Hindu-Muslim animosity into implacable hatred. Like nothing
else, it draws impermeable boundaries between the groups, separates them in an
enmity where there is no longer a bridge between the two.
Not that there are no rumors or even stray incidents of sexual violence. Accounts of
sexual violence during a riot, though, are almost always highly exaggerated. They
seem to be necessary heralds of Kali’s birth. Beside the shared expression of moral
outrage which strengthens the identification with the community, the rumors of
sexual violence (especially of gang rape and sexual mutilation of women) also serve
for the release and vicarious satisfaction of sadistic impulses. The time of Kali gives
men permission for the fantasized fulfilment of the urge to utterly subjugate a
woman, to reduce her consciousness to a reactivity of the flesh alone.
At an emotionally more neutral level, Hindus and Muslims also share a common
disapproval of acts which hurt the religious sentiments of the other community. Such
acts as throwing the carcass of a pig in a mosque or that of a cow in a Hindu temple,
archetypal precipitating incidents for a riot in the sense that there is an unarticulated
expectation that such an incident should belong to the beginning of an account of a
Hindu-Muslim riot even if it did not actually take place, draw condemnation even at
times when communal identities are rampant. This disapproval is often couched in
terms of empathy: ‘Their religious feelings are the same as ours and we would not
like it if it were done to us.’ The existence of this empathy, even in the time of Kali,
prevents a complete dehumaniztion of the ‘enemy’, from a Hindu or Muslim
considering the other as subhuman.
The Killers Among Us.
Most people, of course, do not take part in the actual violence during a riot which is
generally the province of certain young men (and older veterans) of the community
although everyone--man, woman, child--will pitch in when their house or
neighborhood is being attacked by a mob. Almost everyone, though, is an
accessory—if not an accomplice-- to the murders, arson and looting committed by
their own community’s “soldiers.” For in the poor neighborhoods where they live,
there are not too many who would go along with the characterization of the killers as
goondas( i.e. thugs) by the police and upper middle class sentiment. Loosely
organized in gangs, many of their leaders, who are trained wrestlers(pehlwan), earn
the bulk of their income from involvement in the distillation and selling of illegal
liquor and from what they delicately describe as ‘land business.’
Baldly stated, ‘land business’ is an outcome of India’s hopelessly clogged legal
system. Since landlord-tenant disputes as well as other disputes about land and
property can take well over a decade to be sorted out if a redress of grievance is
sought through the courts, the pehlwan is approached by one of the parties to the
dispute to evict or otherwise intimidate the opposing party. The dispute being thus
‘settled’, the pehlwan receives a considerable fee for his services. In case of wellknown pehlwans with a large supply of young toughs as their all-purpose assistants,
land business can be very profitable. Many do not need to use strong-arm methods
any longer. The mere fact that a well-known pehlwan has been engaged by one of the
parties is enough for the opponent to back down and reach a settlement to the dispute.
In some cases, if the second party also employs a pehlwan to protect its interests, the
two pehlwans generally get together and reach a mutually satisfactory solution which,
because of the fear they arouse, they can impose on their clients. Violence occurs
only when a pehlwan tries to muscle into someone else’s territory.
Before the independence of the country in 1947, the wrestlers, Hindu or Muslim,
were traditionally patronized by Indian princes who had court wrestlers just as they
had court painters or musicians. Although some politicians tried to replace the princes
as patrons of wrestling gymnasiums after independence, using them for strong-arm
methods to achieve political ends, in general the wrestler had lost the elevated view
of his calling. It is in the polarization of Hindus and Muslims and in the context of
religious revivalism that the wrestler is again finding a role as an icon of the
community’s physical power and martial prowess. Although he is still often used by
the politician, the wrestler can again hold a moral high ground and be proud of his
new role as ‘protector of the Muslim (or Hindu) nation.’
It is these pehlwans and their gangs of young toughs who take the lead in the killings.
They look upon a riot as a battle, an outbreak of hostilities in a long simmering war
where the killings do not involve moral qualms or compunctions. On the contrary, to
kill under such circumstances is a moral duty higher than the patriotism of a soldier
serving a modern nation-state since killing of members of the other community in a
riot is in service of the nation of one’s faith. Through an arsenal of ideational and
ritual symbols, the violence becomes imbued with religious ultimacy. Indeed, the
violence in Hindu-Muslim conflict should no longer be called a riot, with the
anarchical connotations of the word. Less planned than a battle yet more organized
than a riot, communal violence lies somewhere between the two. Unlike wars, where
victory or defeat is related to the gain or loss of territory, victory in a riot is conceived
of in terms of killing more of the enemy than the lives lost by your own community.
The pehlwans are surprisingly matter of fact, claiming they have never experienced
any kind of blood-lust even during the worst course of communal violence. One of
them stated his attitude toward mutual slaughter as follows: “Riots are like one-day
cricket matches where the killings are the runs scored. You have to score at least one
more run than the opposing team. The whole honor of your nation depends on not
scoring less than the other team.” (Kakar, 1996) After the riot, when the communal
identities begin to recede, their common economic interests reassert themselves. As a
Hindu pehlwan remarked about his interactions with a well-known Muslim one: “A
few days after the riot is over, whatever the bitterness in our hearts and however cold
our voices are initially, Akbar pehlwan has still to call me and say, ‘Mangal bhai
(“brother”), what do we do about that disputed land in Begumpet?’ And I still have to
answer, ‘Let’s get together on that one, Akbar bhai, and solve the problem
peacefully.’ (Kakar, 1996)
The pehlwans also like to maintain a tight discipline on the violence in their own
areas even if they are not always successful, sending their toughs to disperse any mob
that might collect spontaneously. Their warrior identities not only emphasize their
view of themselves as soldiers in service of their faith but also a complete
professionalism in the business of killing. As one of the younger toughs bragged:
“There is a way to kill with a knife. Once I stab I do not need to turn and look back. I
am sure the man is dead even as he is falling.” (Kakar, 1996). This professional
identity is exemplified by an apocryphal story about Sufi pehlwan who retired from
the killing business after the 1979 riot. He is reported to have felt that like everything
else in the country, riots, too, were not what they once used to be. Since each one of
us interprets the world from the limited view we have of it, Sufi pehlwan too saw the
deterioration of the country through his particular professional lens. The quality of
food and thus the toughness of men’s bodies had been steadily degenerating over the
years. Bones had become brittle so that when one stabbed a person there was hardly
any resistance to the knife blade which sliced through muscle, cartilage and bone as if
they were wet clay. Simply put, there was no longer any professional satisfaction to
be obtained from a riot, and Sufi had turned to other, more challenging, if perhaps
less exciting pursuits.
Killers in the service of their religious communities, the pehlwans do not fit easy
psychological or philosophical categories. There is no evidence, for instance, that
they are psychopaths brutally trained to reject human feeling, are sexually insecure or
were abused as children. Endowed with leadership qualities and standing out from
their milieu in certain aspects of their character, they are not—as in Hannah Arendt’s
‘banality of evil’ hypothesis—perfectly ordinary people with the capacity to behave
as monsters. In fact, the psychological profile of six pehlwans obtained through The
Giessen Test (Beckman, Braehler and Richter, 1991), showed a striking similarity to
the average psychological profile of chief executives, the C.E.Os, of large European
and Indian business organizations (Kets de Vries, Kakar, 2000).
Conclusion
In concentrating on the causes of violence between religious/ethnic groups, academic
discourse has generally tended to ignore the actual violence itself. The psychological
states of individuals involved in the process of violence has received insufficient
attention. Taking a case study of Hindu-Muslim violence, I have tried to map out the
psychological shift that occurs when peaceful religious identities come to be replaced
by violent “communal” ones. This shift, initiated by certain actual events, brings to
fore a version of history which emphasizes conflict rather than coexistence between
the groups. The establishment of an inherently violent communal identity is
decisively propelled by religious-political demagogues who stoke persecution anxiety
and by the circulation of rumors which further activate the paranoid potential through
the imagery of the body in imminent danger of extinction. With the establishment of
the primacy of the communal identity, a new morality that sanctions arson, looting
and killing of the male members of the enemy group takes hold. The actual violence,
however, especially the killings, generally remains the province of “professionals”
who view themselves as soldiers in defense of the community’s faith.
Every time violence between religious groups occurs in India or in some other part of
the subcontinent, the reach and spread of modern communications ensure that a vast
number of people are soon aware of the incident. Each riot and its aftermath raise
afresh the issue of an individual’s identification with his religious group and bring it
up to the surface of consciousness. This awareness may be fleeting for some, last
over a period of time for others, but the process is almost always by a pre-conscious
self-interrogation on the significance of the religious community for one’s sense of
identity and the intensity of emotion with which this community is invested. For
varying periods of time, individuals consciously experience their identity through
their religious group rather than through groups based on caste, language, region or
occupation and are thus susceptible to the expression of what I have called a
“communal” identity. The duration of this period, or even whether there will be a
permanent change in the mode of identity experience for some who will henceforth
encase themselves in the armor of an aggressive communal identity, depends on
many factors, not the least on the success of revivalist and fundamentalist political
groupings in encouraging such a switch. From my study in poverty stricken
neighborhoods of Hyderabad, with a long history of riots between the religious
groups and the presence of all the conditions for violence—economic, political,
historical, demographic, social-psychological--, it was encouraging to see how many
Hindus and Muslims have continued to resist a permanent identity switch, returning
to their traditional religious identity and its morality once the violence was over and
the time of Kali had passed.
Author:
Sudhir Kakar is Indian psychoanalyst and writer of international standing. Trained
at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. He teaches at various
prestigious universities in India, Europe and the U.S.A.. Has written numerous essays
and novels that have appeared in numerous languages, among which are: The Colours
of Violence, Infanzia e mondo interno in India. Uno studio psicoanalitico
sull’infanzia e la società in India, Sesso e amore in India, Sciamani, mistici e dottori,
Estasy, Gli Indiani, Mira e Mahatma, and a joint publication with Catherine
Clémente: La folle e il santo.
e- mail: [email protected]
Translated by Lida Patrizia Cancrini Pini

The Time of Kali: Violence between Religious

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